Yesterday’s version of Horace Weston’s Old Time Jig was better than the day before, but it started weak and was emotionally distant. It needed a beginning and it needed fire.
So here it is, the fourth and (I hope) final recording.
It’s 1:43 long. It’s in A minor. The time signature is 2/4. The tempo is 173.
To the extent possible under law, Lucas Gonze
has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to
Horace Weston’s Old Time Jig version 4.
This work is published from
United States.
nice stuff
I enjoyed meeting you at music hack day in boston.
It’s cool to swap songs as part of meeting. Very music industry in a good way.
Superdogand supersally5 is fun.
I keep coming back to this song because it has a cool lilt that I enjoy.
What do you think of the composing, Bob? Any thoughts on what it might say about ol’ Horace Weston?
Before I read anything about Horace Weston, I’d have said that the way that he uses the jig form to write
an instrumental line which is so evocative in its own right anticipates jazz, because the instrument has almost a patient, singing quality about it. Then I read his fascinatnig biography at:
http://books.google.com/books?id=Mjbwkgx785IC&pg=PA95&lpg=PA95&dq=horace+weston&source=bl&ots=t7AYrm9T4o&sig=EtauIXZsFS38l7FbQVWuRCS_w7Y&hl=en&ei=gkAWS7KSNNSztgfetqD7BA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CBYQ6AEwBjgK#v=onepage&q=horace%20weston&f=false
and I say instead that perhaps this is a man who learned the accordion prior to taking up the banjo at age 30, and whose ideas for the banjo were informed by first thinking in other instruments.
Having accordion as his personal starting point makes a lot of sense. His ideas don’t feel at all like they’re about the banjo. Compare to Bauer’s concepts, which are pure banjoism, in “Too Utterly Too“.
I was just reading about Joaquin Rodrigo, the Spanish fellow who composed those concertos which make effective use of classical guitar. The bio related back to this discussion, because apparently he never himself mastered the classical guitar. It’s common in pop, of course, for pop piano songwriters to be poor pianists,
but one would imagine that the classical guitar composer might have a greater challenge, particularly in sorting out the aspirational from the achievable in a particular guitar piece.
Yet it all highlights a form of “cloud computing” that existed long before the computer existed–the conceptual way in which recorded music can be “seen” so that it can be “played” even by those who cannot “play” the music (and, without belaboring the obvious, in Rodrigo’s case, cannot “see” the music literally). I like this music of the mind–the idea that so much of music is not only live performance so much as figuring out a mechanism to get what is in the mind into the ether.
Today I finished my meetings in time to catch the BART back to SFO and my hotel. I was able to hike on the San Francisco Bay trail in Burlingame. The trail featured American redhead and mallard ducks, coots, seagulls, gray clouds, passing planes, cute dogs being walked, and ice plant flowers, bumblebees, waves on rocks, and distant foggy hills.
I took a lot of pictures. I also took a lot of video with a special camera–a little Chinese 4 megapixel camera I got on eBay for 25 dollars [a sunplus], whose light sensor gives an ethereal effect that Mr. Holga, whomever he may be, would envy.
I brought the video to my room at the Crowne Plaza, downloaded Windows Movie Maker 2.6 into Windows 7 ( which, does not come with the best MS program). I’ve long been a huge fan of your jig, and
made it the soundtrack to “Impressions: San Francisco”. It’s a kind of lo-fi sense of my afternoon:
Today I finished my meetings in time to catch the BART back to SFO and my hotel. I was able to hike on the San Francisco Bay trail in Burlingame. The trail featured American redhead and mallard ducks, coots, seagulls, gray clouds, passing planes, cute dogs being walked, and ice plant flowers, bumblebees, waves on rocks, and distant foggy hills.
I took a lot of pictures. I also took a lot of video with a special camera–a little Chinese 4 megapixel camera I got on eBay for 25 dollars [a sunplus], whose light sensor gives an ethereal effect that Mr. Holga, whomever he may be, would envy.
I brought the video to my room at the Crowne Plaza, downloaded Windows Movie Maker 2.6 into Windows 7 ( which, does not come with the best MS program). I’ve long been a huge fan of your jig, and
made it the soundtrack to “Impressions: San Francisco”. It’s a kind of lo-fi sense of my afternoon:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/46183897@N00/4369844116/
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